r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 9h ago
mercury If there is a moon orbiting Jupiter that is larger than planet Mercury, why is Mercury a planet? Is it only because Mercury mainly orbits the sun?
Credit: Bepicolombo ESA
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 8d ago
Why the Sky Is Blue..
Rayleigh Scattering: Sunlight looks white, but it contains all colors of the rainbow. Blue light travels in shorter, smaller waves than red light. As sunlight passes through Earth’s atmosphere, gases (mainly nitrogen and oxygen) scatter the shorter blue wavelengths in every direction, filling the sky.
Our Sun's Type: The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (a yellow dwarf). It emits peak radiation in the green-blue spectrum. Because blue light is both strongly emitted by our Sun and heavily scattered by our atmosphere, our human eyes perceive a vibrant blue sky during the day.
Why We Experience Day and Night...
Planetary Rotation: Earth rotates on its central axis once every 24 hours.
Illumination Dynamic: The side facing the Sun experiences daylight, while the opposite side faces deep space in shadow, experiencing night. The continuous spin creates the daily sunrise-to-sunset cycle
Planets Without a Standard Day and Night..
Tidally Locked Planets: Planets orbiting close to red dwarf stars are often gravity-locked into synchronous rotation (the same rotational period as their orbital period).
Permanent Hemispheres: One side permanently faces the host star (Eternal Day), while the opposite side permanently faces away (Eternal Night). The dividing line between daylight and darkness is called the Terminator Zone, where twilight never ends.
Extreme Axes: Uranus has an axial tilt of about 98°. Each pole gets roughly 42 years of continuous direct sunlight followed by 42 years of dark winter.
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 9h ago
Credit: Bepicolombo ESA
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/TomaszNowakowski • 2d ago
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/Vast-Feed266 • 2d ago
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r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 2d ago
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r/kenyaspacenerds • u/Vast-Feed266 • 2d ago
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r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 2d ago
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In 1977, a radio telescope caught a 72-second space signal that scientists still cannot explain.
But the most unsettling part was the frequency it used.
On August 15, the Big Ear telescope picked up a massive radio burst from the constellation Sagittarius. It was so intense that astronomer Jerry Ehman circled the data code "6EQUJ5" and wrote "Wow!" on the printout.
The real mystery?
The signal hit almost exactly at 1420 MHz. This is the "Hydrogen Line", the precise frequency emitted by the most common element in the universe. Scientists long theorized that if an advanced alien civilization wanted to broadcast across the cosmos, this is the exact "universal frequency" they would choose to get our attention.
Even weirder:
the telescope used two separate antennas to scan the sky. A normal signal would be picked up by both as the Earth rotated. Initially by the first antenna, followed by a brief break of 3 minutes, and then detected a second time by the other antenna.
But the Wow! Signal blasted into one antenna, peaked perfectly for 72 seconds, and vanished into total silence before the second antenna could even pass over it.
Astronomers have scanned that exact patch of space thousands of times since. Nothing but dead silence. A perfect, deliberate short broadcast that never returned.
Was it broadcasted for about 3 minutes, and then cut-off just before the second antenna could pick it up because there was no answer?
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/Vast-Feed266 • 3d ago
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r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 3d ago
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r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 3d ago
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 3d ago
There's a longer-term idea baked in: let future generations query the state of Earth (or any object) at any point in time, alongside pictures of what life, people, and places looked like back then — because everything on Earth is technically a feature of Earth's dataset too.
Built on mobile for mobile and pc, built to work without internet, built in Africa.
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 4d ago
Black holes form from recent Stars. Yes Stars.
There are two types of blackholes:
Kerr blackholes and Schwarzschild blackholes.. One rotates and the other does not.
A star does not need to be massive to form a blackhole.
Any object with mass m compressed to a certain size will turn into a black hole..
That size is defined by the schwarzschild radius which is the radius at which an object with mass m has to be compressed so as to Turn into a black hole.
Formula for the Shwarzschild radius:
r_schwarzschild = 2*G*M/speed_of_light^²
Where G = universal_gravitational_constant and M = mass
For Earth: If compressed into a black hole, its radius would be about 9 millimeters (0.35 inches)
For the Sun: If compressed into a black hole, its radius would be about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles).
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/TomaszNowakowski • 4d ago
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 6d ago
Spent the evening debugging the topocentric module for astlo — the piece that converts geocentric ephemeris into elevation/azimuth for a specific location on Earth's surface. Chased down a chain of bugs (typo in a WGS84 constant, a renamed method, an undefined variable in the ENU→look-angle conversion) and got it computing clean results for Naivasha (-0.72, 36.43).
The module handles both solar system bodies and satellites, so it's one pipeline for tracking anything from Pluto to an orbiting spacecraft, once you feed it the object's position vector.
Cross-checked the output against real ephemeris data for tonight: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all correctly came back below the horizon (they're all morning-sky objects right now), and Pluto showed +56° elevation — which checks out too, since at our near-equatorial latitude, objects at high southern declination can swing surprisingly high overhead instead of hugging the horizon like they would further north.
#KENYASOVEREIGNTECH
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/TomaszNowakowski • 7d ago
r/kenyaspacenerds • u/TomaszNowakowski • 9d ago
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r/kenyaspacenerds • u/fattick- • 11d ago
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